How do you eat an elephant?

It is 11:30am, and I am at the end of my procrastination habits. Next to me on the desk, my tea is growing cold because I stopped drinking it in order to vacuum the apartment. Coconut is crawling over my arms, scouring for bobby pins and attention. When she finds a bobby pin, she takes it in her mouth, jumps off the desk, and drops the bobby pin into my shoes. I am resisting stringing Christmas lights to counteract the dreary snow-threatening clouds outside.

I have a deadline. I have to write somewhere around twenty cohesive pages of narrative by tomorrow. Or I have to find them in my journals somewhere. So I open my journals, scouring for something promising. A scene to wrap my twenty pages around.

These are the moments that precede my writing. These are the moments of distraction and resistance. I don’t want to sit at the desk, or a chair, or a coffee shop. I don’t want to type, to hold a pen—I don’t want to write. So I stand up and make tea. Sit down. Stand up and vacuum. Sit down. Throw the cat off the desk. Put her on the balcony. Let her back in. Think about writing. Plan the writing in my head. Sit down. Resist the writing.

I want to sit down and have the writing out on the page. Boom! Ten pages of fantastic paragraphs to shape, mold, and find in a narrative.

But it doesn’t happen that way.

It happens when I glue myself to the chair, my fingers to the keyboard, my eyes to the Microsoft-Word-simulated page in front of me.

In my head, I hold the subject, the scene. It’s big. It’s more than ten pages big. It’s an elephant in my head.

When I was faced with this problem a few years ago, my dad asked, “How do you eat an elephant?”

One bite at a time.

But I don’t think an elephant would taste very good, so I need a new metaphor.

How do you climb a mountain? One step at a time.

How do you rappel back down the mountain? Jumping over one cactus at a time.

How do you climb a tree? One branch at a time.

How do you drive through Pittsburgh? One hill at a time.

How do you eat chocolate cake? One savory bite at a time.

Anne Lamott's brother put his bird project together one bird at a time.

So how do you build a story? One sentence at a time.

And sentences are built with words.

And words with letters.



I know I resist writing like this... so I'm learning how to trick myself too. It's 11:30am, and I'm at the end of my procrastination habits, I'm glued to my chair, and I have the rest of today and most of tomorrow to build these twenty pages one savory sentence at a time.